Toon: Joel Pett on our over crowded prisons and the war on drugs.

[alfredo]

[Richard Steele]

1. K&R

[alfredo]

4. Thank you.

[Richard Steele]

5. Anytime! (sneaky "just being polite" KICK) nm

[alfredo]

6. We do what we have to do.

[Richard Steele]

7. A-yup. We certainly do. Oh, BTW...

...as long as no one else is using this thread much,
and I'd like a good excuse to keep it kicked by creating
a small subthread...:evilgrin:

I just thought I'd mention that I recently acquired a small
Pentium III WinDoze box, and I intend to set it up as a dedicated
24/7/365 "Folding at Home" machine.

It's got some issues, but I've got a TS friend who's gonna run diagnostics
on it as soon as his office gives him a minute or two to breathe.

And it don't matter what's wrong (I suspect a bad video card),
because parts for that 2000-era PC are so cheap that even a poor artist like me
can afford to get it running better than new.

Hell, I might just ask my friend with the truck to make a Saturday run
to the City Dump, grab 50 free PCs out of the big bin, and tear them apart
until we find what we need.



Actually, now that I think of it, that's a pretty good idea.
I could call it a party- A few of my friends are pretty good
with that PC-part-swapping stuff; they have the skills
and they have the tools.

I could get a few folks together, spend $5 in gas
to grab an entire truckload of old abandoned PCs,
hand out grounding straps as party favors, and maybe
spend $50 for snacks and $150 for a small baggie
of dried green "crazy project enthusiasm enhancer"...

A few hours of that and I could have a STACK of 5 or 10 old WinDoze
boxes running the Folding at Home program for an outlay of $250.

Y'know, I really have been looking for something WORTHY
to fill one of my most excellent vintage Motorola™ power-supply cabinets with...
This might be the project they've been waiting for!







I'm glad we had this little talk! :party:

[alfredo]

8. You going to run Windows or Linux? You could go very minimal

by not installing X and just run FAH in console mode. You will have very little overhead to slow you down.

I had a F@h thread just recently. If you want to give it a sympathy kick, I won't mind.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2955225

[Richard Steele]

9. Dunno yet, but "minimal" is Job One to maximize useful CPU cycles with old boxes, no?

I've been led to believe that the box in question
has Win2k on it- if that's intact, I'll leave well enough
alone, delete everything that can be deleted, and use it as-is.
Stick it under the desk, and turn on the CRT once a week to make sure
it's still running.

For my wild-eyed "PC-stack" idea...if I ever do that, I'm thinking
that a lightweight Linux distro with no bells or whistles
might be the best way to "associate" a bunch of disparate vintage IBM
boxes and get them to share a single cat5 modem port.

[alfredo]

10. Sounds like you will have a serious setup. I'm just running a

2gig Mac Mini, but it has catapulted me from 156 to 25 on the DU team. If my Mini can do that well, that means we need more big iron on our team.

[Richard Steele]

12. That really would be a serious setup to run a single number-crunching routine, wouldn't it?

That was just kinda a random thought I had a few hours ago...

But the more I think about it, the more totally DOABLE it seems.

With last week's free linux OS, and last year's discarded hardware,
I could stack some old PC's and crunch numbers like a 20-million-dollar
CRAY supercomputer never dreamed of in 1989.

Which is cool for me, because I've been itching to start running F@H,
and my "Plan B" actually involved a 1980's-vintage CRAY mainframe.

This guy I see every once in a while, around 3:00AM at the Waffle House...
he works security at a warehouse, and he's been babysitting a
a static-proof-bubble-wrapped CRAY MAINFRAME the size of a refrigerator
that arrived 2 weeks after he started the job back in '89.
The GOV agency that stored it paid a year's rent up front, and then got defunded.
So no one owns it anymore, and no one even knows it's there....


Temptation...oh, the temptation.

[alfredo]

13. I wonder how many watts that sucker pulls.

[CherokeeDem]

2. Love This Guy

Having lived in Lexington for years...he is one of our jewels..

The cartoon "The Tab" from a couple of days ago is one of his best. Link to his page at the Lexington Herald-Leader: http://www.kentucky.com/594.

Enjoy!

[alfredo]

3. I've lived in Lexington since 95. Great town. We might even know

each other.

Check out Pett's video.

[ulysses]

11. happy to be #5.

:thumbsup:

[alfredo]

14. Being #5 doesn't mean you are not #1 in my book.